Personally I think perfection is overrated. While its pursuit can sometimes be a noble endeavour beneficial to the greater good, its realisation is neither possible nor desirable. Neurologist Rita Levi-Montalcini, winner of 1986 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine, titled her autobiography In Praise of Imperfection, her conviction being that human creativity and greatness were the rewards of imperfection.

True perfection would have disastrous consequences. Were we to agree, for example, that the incomparable purée de pomme de terre of Joël Robuchon was perfect there would be no incentive to do better or find better. Never mind that Robuchon’s version of mash should more accurately be titled purée de beurre fondue – “purée of melted butter” – with the odd potato mixed in.

I don’t very much like the look of perfection either. Maybe it’s a class thing. My grandfather, Paul Young (né Yankelovich), was a Polish-born, Jewish-American baker who always sent us home with large brown papers filled with the ugliest cakes imaginable. We identified their unvarnished appearance and plain packaging with the rustic ways of the old country and trusted his marble cakes, sponge cakes, Danish and babkas were vastly superior to the frilly production numbers on display in the window cases of finer French- or Viennese-inspired bakeries.

Imagine my pleasure then when in May of this year I spotted these words across the bottom of menu at the acclaimed and fashionable New York pizza restaurant Co.:

Our pies are not always round.

Co. was created by Jim Lahey of the esteemed Sullivan Street Bakery to recognise and celebrate the art of baking in the form of pizza. And that form, according to the menu caveat also employed as a “company” slogan, does not need to be a perfect circle to be good. A misshapen pizza might even taste better for its faults.

Home-made should look hand-made. Why would anyone want to cut chips (fries) by hand to such precision they would give guests the impression they’d been sliced by a machine? Where’s the satisfaction in shaping burger patties by hand to a tight, smooth, flat, flawless round that only a meat-packing plant could produce?

The trouble with cooking to any mould, be it a block of silicone hearts or the exacting template of an uncompromising chef, is that it thwarts the excitement of the unpredictable. Michelin-star-worthy fussiness is a culinary ideal embraced at the expense of whim, mood, chance and surprise.

Even those who don’t buy into the romance of rusticity should recognise that Lahey has handed home cooks a valuable out, a get-out-of-jail card to be used when we screw in the kitchen: The next time you slide a half-burned, amoeba-shaped pizza out of the oven only to discover all of its molten mozzarella has slid to one side and all its tomato to the other, don’t despair: Just tell your guests this is the way they do it in the old country.