The way Luisa Carinci delicately, mindlessly, effortlessly and—of course—flawlessly wrapped each 3-inch cord of pasta dough around her index finger, forming fat ringlets called anellini that piled on the table one after another, you’d swear she’d been doing this since childhood. In fact, she’d come to pasta making late in life. And under duress.

“Our parents would threaten my sisters and me when we didn’t want to do our schoolwork: ‘Fine! Stay home and help us make pasta,’” said Carinci, giving an ironic shrug to her kitchen now stacked with pasta making equipment. It was motivation enough to stick with her studies.

“But both my family and my husband’s family were good cooks, so eventually I had to learn it even if I didn’t want to.”

I was glad she had. I’d come to Pescara, a seaside town that hugs the Adriatic on Italy’s eastern coast, to learn pasta alla pecorara, a cook-what-­you-have dish with roots in Abruzzo’s long history of raising sheep in the nearby mountains. In fact, the dish’s name is a derivative of an Italian family name that means shepherd.

Traditionally, it was prepared by the shepherds, who always had access to ricotta cheese and some variety of vegetables, so they used what they had. Carinci started her version with a soffritto, a blend of diced carrot, onion and celery cooked until tender and sweet in copious olive oil, a generous helping of pancetta and crushed tomatoes.

Next, eggplant, zucchini, bell peppers and mushrooms. These got far lighter treatment, cooked one at a time and just long enough to soften, each in its own time. When the pasta was ready, everything was brought together: soffritto, vegetables and pasta, a heap of fresh marjoram for good measure.

Off heat, she stirred in ample ricotta mixed with grated Parmesan. And to serve, more of both. The finished dish was wonderful, thanks in large part to Carinci’s respect for each vegetable, cooking them only long enough to coax out sweet-savory flavor, yet retain their distinctiveness, a good balance to the chew of the pasta and the creaminess of the cheeses.

A lesson that it’s never too late to master an amazing pasta.