After spending 22 hours without power this weekend, I am eying the refrigerator warily, as if it is out to get me and mine. We resisted the temptation to open the refrigerator and freezer doors while we waited for utility crews to undo Sunday morning’s storm damage, but I’m still concerned about some of the food items that endured the outage.

The frozen meat didn’t thaw, but the yellow puddle of goo beneath the half-gallon of vanilla ice cream is probably a clue that we won’t be eating that anytime soon. While the milk was still a bit cool, there are a few questionable items, mostly leftovers, which I will proclaim to be dog snacks, rather than worry about them.

My Irish ancestors would have suffered from none of this indecision about food safety. Among my mishmash of Western European forebears are a few Irish folk, who, I feel certain, were a wily, hard-scrabble lot with extensive expertise in food preservation, sans refrigeration.

Exhibit A is, obviously, corned beef, the mainstay of the St. Patrick’s Day menu. A testament to the ingenuity of poor people who have run out of options, corning beef has more in common with embalming than cooking. Yum.

After soaking a tough piece of meat (usually brisket or tongue) in brine, spices and saltpeter for at least three weeks, the patient Irish cook was rewarded with a tender roast that could be stored for some time without refrigeration. It is no accident that cabbage and potatoes, two long-storing vegetables, are the frequent companions of corned beef. Together they make the complete meal from unrefrigerated ingredients.

Although sauerkraut is generally credited to the Germans, it also is a product of the same food-preservation chemistry. Sauerkraut also is prepared over time in a brine-filled crock. Like corned beef, sauerkraut produces a foam that must be skimmed on a regular basis. And like corned beef, the lid of the brining crock must be securely weighted down, as if to keep some evil force safely in its place.

The marriage of these two brined foods is, of course, the Reuben sandwich, which I always have considered an acquired taste. The Reuben sandwich is important to note because, come Saturday, it will be the final destination for much of the leftover St. Patrick’s Day corned beef.

And even once you have acquired a taste for the Reuben, you definitely have to be in the mood for a Reuben. There is nothing subtle about a Reuben, no neutral ingredients to balance or modify the impact of any other. Every single component of the sandwich is sharply flavored: the dark rye or pumpernickel bread, the corned beef, the sauerkraut, the Swiss cheese.

Factor in as well that many Reuben sandwiches are served with horseradish or dark mustard, and I am hard-pressed to name a single other meal that combines so many competing, clashing flavors. If the Reuben had an equivalent in fashion, it would be an eye-popping Glamour Don’t.

But the Reuben will rule this weekend. Made with thinly sliced corned beef and gently grilled, it is the taste of the season – and a monument to pre-industrial food science.