Boeuf Gardian

BOEUF GARDIAN
(This is the recipe that all the Popes of Avignon loved and that today is still the region’s typical recipe).

Ingredients (serves 6)

1 kg of beef shoulder
2 large yellow onions
3 carrots
3 garlic cloves
3 anchovy fillets in oil
½ jar of green olives
1 bottle of Camargue red wine
1 beef stock cube
1 sprig of rosemary
1 sprig of thyme
1 bay leaf
Olive oil
Salt, pepper

Peel and chop the onions. Peel the garlic cloves and leave them whole.

Heat a saucepan with a drizzle of oil. Fry the onions and garlic for 5 minutes. Add the chopped beef, stir and allow to colour lightly.

Meanwhile, rinse, peel and cut the carrots into thick slices. Add them to the saucepan, stir.

Add the anchovies, stock cube, herbs. Season with salt and pepper, add the olives and cover with the red wine.

Cover the pot, lower the heat, and cook for 2 hours.

At the end of cooking, taste to adjust the seasoning. Turn up the heat and uncover the pot to reduce the cooking sauce.

Serve with cooked Camargue pilaf rice.

This recipe is traditionally prepared with bull meat. But since the Camargue region is the cradle of bullfighting in France, we prefer to use beef: bull meat comes from bulls that have died in bullfights. There is nothing more harmful to health than the meat of an animal that dies suffering: the toxins it releases are thousands and all enter our bodies, producing serious diseases such as gout. It is no coincidence that many nobles in the past centuries died of gout. They were great consumers of game, killed with the weapons of the time: a pheasant or a roe deer running with an arrow stuck in its body dies suffering terribly and releasing toxins, which pass into the body of those who eat its flesh. Hence people die from gout, as did Charles V, Louis XIV and many others.

We must mention an extraordinary pope, Pius V, who on 1 November 1567, with the papal bull De salute Gregis Dominici, formally and forever banned bull runs and bullfights (very much in vogue in Rome at that time) and decreed the immediate penalty of excommunication for any Catholic who authorized and participated in them, also ordering the refusal of a religious burial to Catholics who might die because of their participation in a bullfighting show. (Liana Marabini)