This Quick Vegetarian Ragù Is a Shortcut to Glory

Only around 100 people live in Acone, a village high on a mountain in Tuscany first settled in the sixth century and mentioned in passing in Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” as the poet wanders through heaven. Ixta Belfrage thinks of that mountain as home, though she spent just a few years there as a child. She, too, wandered heaven, down rolling hills and roads lined with cypress trees as tall and slender as spires.

Are we ever released from our first loves? The village is home to a single restaurant, Ristorante Pizzeria Acone, and there, under bare wooden beams, you will find the dish that, for Belfrage, decades later, is still the one: penne all’Aconese, rich with dried porcini mushrooms, cured pork, tomato paste dark and deep, a storm of black pepper, cosseting cream, red chile like tethered sun. Or so she has had to deduce from taste, because the recipe is secret and belongs to Acone alone.

To achieve something close, she has improvised on her own, which is how she learned to cook. “No one taught me,” she says. On visits to her grandparents’ home in Mexico — she’s named after a nearby volcano — she lurked in the kitchen, watching as tortillas were slapped down and chiles gutted and fried. Beyond that, it was all instinct. “Recipes often come about because of mistakes,” she says. “There should be no rules.” It’s a philosophy that has taken her from an entry-level job at Nopi in London to creating recipes alongside the chef Yotam Ottolenghi (a writer of this column).

For the 2020 cookbook “Ottolenghi Flavor,” which celebrates vegetables, she wanted to make a lasagna that could achieve true meatiness without meat. She thought back to Acone and the power of porcini, whose name means “little pigs” in Italian, a nod to their chubby stems and broad, fleshy caps. They’re tricky to cultivate, because they become one with the trees they feed upon — spruce, pine, chestnut, hemlock — with long tendril threads that tangle with the tree roots and spread in great labyrinths through the forest floor. And so they’re typically gathered from the wild and taste of it, luscious and nutty, profoundly of the earth.

The lasagna called for a ragù of not only dried porcini, soaked and strained, but also nearly three pounds of fresh mushrooms, which had to be finely chopped, roasted, crisp-fried with the revived porcini until caramelized and, finally, simmered in the broth from the porcini bath. It took the better part of an afternoon. Readers loved the dish but wilted at the labor.

When she wrote her own cookbook, “Mezcla,” published two years later, she set herself a challenge: to see if she could capture the same intensity of flavor, but in no time at all. Out went the elaborate layers of lasagna; her focus now was just the ragù — although, as she writes in “Mezcla,” can you call a sauce a ragù if it doesn’t demand hours on the stove to be coaxed into bloom?

But why not a shortcut to glory? Must we always toil and suffer for something to be good? Here: Leave the porcini to soak for 10 minutes and swell back to life. There is some fine chopping, enough to make you feel as if you’ve done your part. Scatter garlic, chile and parsley in a pan for a gentle fry, turn up the heat, add the chopped porcini and some tomato paste and rain down pepper. All the while the pasta’s boiling. Melt some Parmesan into the mushrooms, swirl with pasta water and porcini broth and let it bubble. A dab of cream, then a slicking and coating of the pasta, and it’s on the table.

Note that this is not penne all’Aconese, just a homage to it. Belfrage has never asked for the recipe. “I don’t need to know,” she says. She wants to eat it as it was meant to be, on that mountain, where “the sun shines bright and time goes faster and slower all at once,” she writes in “Mezcla.” Although her family no longer has a home there, every few years she dares the ascent once more, the winding road with its narrow bends. She takes a seat and waits for the dish to come.

Isn’t she afraid it might not live up to her memory of it? She shakes her head. “It tastes exactly the same every time,” she says. “It’s perfect.”