Dear, Swear You’ll Take Me to the Rabbit Party

Malta, located just south of Sicily, has been ruled by just about every country around the Mediterranean except Albania. The Phoenicians, Greeks, North Africans, French (a couple of times), Catalans and Italians have all left their marks, particularly the North Africans and Italians.

So Maltese dishes tend to have names consisting of bits and pieces you recognize and others you don’t. Qarabaghli biz-zalza pikkanti is zucchini in a salsa piccante. Rabbit pie is torta tal-fenek.

Now fenek--a word that, in North Africa, refers to a tiny desert fox--is an odd thing to call rabbit. But it makes sense if you consider that the rabbit is not native to Malta. It was introduced to the island by the Crusader order of the Knights of St. John (since known as the Knights of Malta).

The Knights had imported rabbits as game for hunting, so they wouldn’t let the Maltese kill any of them. This was quite unpopular because rabbits are notorious for poaching on gardens. (Think Flopsy, think Mopsy, think Cottontail.)

But the Maltese had their revenge for this plague of furry little vegetable-munchers: the fenkata, or rabbit party. It’s a sort of picnic where people go out into the country, cook up some rabbits and have them with spaghetti. (Take that, you Knights!) The Maltese anthropologist Carmel Cassar has written a whole book about it: “Fenkata, an Emblem of Maltese Peasant Resistance.”

Some fenkatas were particularly big deals, involving dancing and all-night partying. The one at Buskett on the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul (June 29) was so popular that marriage contracts sometimes required that a husband promise to bring his future wife there.