My family had been invited to spend a quiet weekend at a beautiful home in the rarefied air of the Hamptons, lounging by the plunge pool, perusing the farm stands, and wearing freshly pressed shirts.

What does one bring to such a posh setting? I decided to bring cheese.

I had just made a big batch of pimento cheese, as one casually does, so I packed a cup of it into a tupperware container and asked my wife to grab it from the fridge as we loaded up the car. When we arrived in East Hampton, I realized she’d left behind the tupperware and instead brought the remaining giant bowl of pimento cheese.

Within 48 hours, the bowl was emptied and I’d been looped into a text chain of people asking for the recipe. Pimento cheese is that good, y’all. Pimento cheese will help you win friends and influence people.

The decision to combine pimento and cheese can be traced back to New York City, but the South appropriated it almost a century ago, and the gospel of pimento cheese has radiated from down below since. I’ve seen pimento cheese referred to alternately as “the caviar of the South” and “the pate of the South,” although to me it’s more like Southern hummus, a versatile ingredient equally at home as the feature of a dish or playing a supporting role. (Only instead of puréed beans, it’s cheese and chopped roasted peppers mixed with mayonnaise, plus some seasoning.) Some argue pimento cheese is at its best simply slathered between two slices of plain white bread. I love it as a dip, with hearty crackers that can stand up to its heft. [Ed: Ritz forever!]

Growing up, I remember regularly eating pimento cheese slathered on burgers at The Varsity, an Atlanta institution. As it sits on the hot meat, the cheese melts and drips off the sides and becomes more of a suggestion of a topping than an actual topping. The electric orange grease that runs onto your hands is a signal that you’re in for something truly special.

In her terrific cookbook “Poole’s: Recipes and Stories from a Modern Diner,” the James Beard Award-winning chef Ashley Christensen writes evocatively of the impact pimento cheese had on her growing up in the South: “For me, pimento cheese is inextricably linked with the memory of the salty South Carolina summer heat, the smell of the freshly cut grass, and the outlines of my small fingers impressed in the cool white bread.”

“I had this conversation with someone the other day,” Christensen told me recently, “someone everyone realized was not a Southerner because he referred to it as ‘pimento cheese spread.’ No, it is a spread, but you don’t call it a spread. And I have a bunch of friends from California, and whenever they come in the restaurants, they always call it ‘pimento and cheese.’ Which is, like, one of it’s technical names, but I think it’s funny.”

The Poole’s cookbook contains the best pimento cheese recipe I have found. It demands attention to detail, from roasting and pickling your own red peppers to making your own mayonnaise to toasting your peppercorns. Christensen also asks you to finely shred your onion, which is particularly genius in the way it makes the onion pervasive but not offensive. It is an artisanal approach, completely at odds with some pimento cheese recipes which essentially call for just mixing together a bunch of pre-packaged ingredients. But all the extra work makes the finished product so much better.