During the war as most here will remember, lots of things were hard to come by. My father's favourite sweet was rice pudding, which mum used to bake in the oven, with a knob of hard come by butter and milk which resulted in a lovely brown skin rising over the rice (there may have been sugar involved as well, but I don't recall). Obviously, that was a pretty extravagant dish for the time and was only produced on pretty rare occasions. One time mum served it up with an even more spectacular skin than normal (I actually preferred the skin to the rice, but that's kids for you!). As she dug the serving spoon in the skin collapsed - she'd forgotten to include the rice!
Mike