Sometimes the most important cooking technique is benign neglect. Or more politely, knowing when to step away from the stove and let time and heat do the heavy lifting.

That’s certainly the case with ragù cilentano, a thick, rich tomato sauce I first learned of somewhat by chance in the kitchen at Tenuta Nonno Luigi, a restaurant in the town of Bellosguardo in Italy’s Campania region.

The restaurant’s name roughly means Grampa Luigi’s Place. And perched on a rambling hillside of olive trees, lavender and rosemary, the yard littered with antique green glass wine casks, it does have that feel.

Chef Giuseppe Croce was teaching me his ethereal take on onion rings—paper thin, barely breaded, fried until crackling, drizzled with balsamic syrup—when I noticed a pot of something thick and red.

A local dish drawn from cucina povera and of no real interest, he assured me. I took a smell, then dabbed a spoon into it for a taste. It was an explosion, an intense, paste-like tomato sauce studded with bits of beef, pork and plenty of other this-and-that hunks of meat. I assured him it was of very real interest.

With a shrug, he dropped a handful of freshly made pasta into boiling water. When it was nearly finished, he scooped it out and into a skillet, adding a generous ladle of that thick sauce and an equally liberal splash of the pasta cooking water.

With a few flips of the skillet, the sauce loosened and coated the pasta. In a minute, the tangle was mounded on a plate and topped with grated aged ricotta. The taste was so deep and so rich, it almost was hard to believe.

Ragù cilentano, it turns out, is an ancient recipe, a mainstay of the working poor who managed the farmlands of local nobility. They had two things in abundance—tomatoes and the scraps of meat deemed unfit for their bosses—and one thing in short supply—time to fuss at the stove over dinner. Together, those factors collaborated to create an amazing sauce.

Croce explained that the only way for the workers to get a meal on the table was to combine the ingredients in the morning—tomatoes, maybe some onions and herbs, and those stray bits of meat—and let them cook down, untended for many hours while they worked the fields. By evening, they had a rich sauce easily stored and thinned for serving as needed.

That simplicity made this recipe easy to adapt. Most of us don’t spend our days in the fields, so we used tomato paste to mimic the flavor of a long reduction. We also moved the cooking into the more even heat of the oven, where the sauce cooks down without attention from us.

Finally, since we’ve long lost our taste for scavenging for meat scraps from nobility, we opted to use beef short ribs and pancetta, both of which can handle a long simmer and deliver big, bold meaty flavor. Because any dish that gets better for being ignored deserves a place on our table.