G7 chef Massimo Bottura got it wrong – crispy lasagne is a leftover meal not a centrepiece

Massimo Bottura was wheeled out to cook for world leaders attending the G7 conference in Italy on Thursday. Bottura is one of the country’s most famous chefs, who describes his restaurant, Osteria Francescana, in the northern town of Modena, as a “laboratory of ideas”. It is where he serves a 15-course tasting menu for €350, plus booze and service. His schtick is an avant-garde approach to Italian gastronomy, which was on display at the leaders’ dinner at the resort of Borgo Egnazia in Puglia, with the centrepiece described on the menu as “the crunchy part of the lasagne”.

You’ll understand his wit here, for lasagne is a classic Italian dish, whose roots are in 14th-century Naples. And it doesn’t matter how good the lasagne is, it always tastes much better the next day when you bung what remains of it in a hot oven, singeing the protruding edges of the pasta as you go. You then scrape off the other charred bits from the sides of the dish, add a dollop of tomato ketchup, mayonnaise or Dijon mustard – or preferably all three – and serve with some crunchy lettuce and a glass of chilled Pecorino (the wine, not the cheese). It’s a wonderful supper. But that’s what it needs to be, actual leftovers.

Served as an imitation of a leftover, as a quirky dish on a tasting menu, it feels sorely lacking. And what it lacks is actual hinterland. By definition, it cannot be made especially – it must be a leftover; last night’s perfect dish rendered more heavenly when it’s a surprise. It has sat around, gone cold, then is re-heated and provides that unexpected pleasure, the economy of clever cooking where the cook produces a little more than is necessary but in doing so gives a dish a second life. Like roasted chicken for Sunday lunch that becomes a sandwich on Monday, the bones boiled for soup on Tuesday, it is the dish that keeps on giving.

One of the great joys of food is the emotion that can be attached to it, how its backstory elevates it, how flavour is seemingly enhanced by the pleasure created. Your own asparagus, for example, grown by your own fair hand from crowns, that pushed up spears for three years which you, obsessively, refused to cut to strengthen the roots so that by year four, the plants would reach their potential. You put the pan on to boil while you go into the garden to cut the spears which you then poach, until they are al dente and eat with nothing but melted butter.

There may be absolutely no scientific difference between those spears and the ones you buy from Waitrose, yet yours palpably, actually, taste better.

Bottura’s burnt lasagne has no backstory. And neither has the, otherwise perfect, bread and butter pudding served at The Devonshire, a much-lauded new pub in London’s Soho. Their pudding has a perfect, sweet and silken custard, the bread is soft but still with a little bite and the top is torched like the top of a crème brûlée. But a bread and butter pudding can only be perfect if it uses bread that is going stale, the same with a summer pudding; they are kitchen economies made divine on account of their ingenuity.

The same can be said for the chipolatas that are left over from breakfast. They sit on a plate on the Aga, still warm a good hour or so after breakfast. You walk past them, grab one and pop it in. And it tastes better than it did at breakfast. Moreover, if you know that your other half has left them there for the children to eat for lunch, and they are therefore strictly out of bounds from greedy Daddy, guess what? They taste even better. Science would posit they taste the same as they did at breakfast. But we all know the truth: the transgressive pleasure of a naughty sausage. When science battles faith the only victors are the philosophers.

Mind you, perhaps Massimo Buttura has the last laugh as he can always tell the story of how threw a dinner party for world leaders and served them burnt ends of lasagne.