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EveryCow

Tuesday

Mardi Gras, the fat Tuesday, when butchers in Paris, New Orleans and many French towns once paraded the fat ox, the Bœuf Gras.

Once a year, Tuesday was the day of the fat ox. Mardi Gras, the Tuesday before Lent, was a feast of meat before forty days without it, and butchers' guilds across France marked it by parading the finest ox of the season through the streets. The custom spread to Belgium, Canada and Louisiana, and it survives in revived parades in Paris and in the great float of the New Orleans carnival.

The Bœuf Gras of Paris

In Paris the butchers' procession of the Bœuf Gras was for centuries one of the high points of carnival: a huge ox, garlanded with flowers and ribbons, was led or carried on a float through the city with musicians, riders and a child dressed as a cupid riding on its back. Towns such as Orléans, Chalon-sur-Saône and Nantes had their own. The Paris parade faded in the twentieth century and was revived in 1998 as part of the city's carnival, and the Promenade du Bœuf Gras has walked again every year since.

Louisiana and the Rex parade

French settlers brought the fat ox to New Orleans, where a live animal was paraded at carnival in the nineteenth century. Since 1909 it has been replaced by a float carrying a large sculpted ox, which rolls in the Mardi Gras parade of the Krewe of Rex, and local lore holds that seeing it brings a good year. In Mobile, Alabama, a society of the same name keeps a smaller parade. In the old Catholic calendar the next day, Ash Wednesday, began the Lenten fast from meat.

Traditions

  • Bœuf Gras: The fat ox paraded by butchers at carnival.
  • Mardi Gras: The last feast day before Lent.
  • Rex parade: New Orleans' Mardi Gras parade, led by the ox float.

The breeds

CharolaisThe white beef breed long favoured for French show oxen.NormandeThe Normandy breed of the old Paris markets.

Also part of it, and being written: Limousin cattle (A red-gold French beef breed of the fat stock fairs.).

Sources and further reading

About this page

Written by the EveryCow desk with AI assistance. Customs differ by community and family, and are described here as tradition, not instruction. If this is your tradition and we have it wrong, tell us.

Photo credits on this page

The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.

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