It is some years since I saw, in a Paris bookshop, a translated copy of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit, but I still enjoy recalling the French names given for the four members of the rabbit family: Flopson, Mopson, Queue-de-coton et Pierre. Cottontail is the species of rabbit which is found all over the United States; an amphibious swamp rabbit inhabits the bayous of Louisiana, and a rare marsh cottontail, which lives in Florida, has been given the name sylvilagus palustris hefneris, apparently in honour of the founder of Playboy magazine and its ‘bunnies’.
Rabbits are also commonly found in central America, as I learnt while in Mexico and Guatemala earlier this month. In the 1970s the Mexican president tried to persuade his people to breed rabbits as a source of cheap food — rather than breed like rabbits, which they continue to do — but his campaign met with little success. However, I was intrigued to see, on a visit to Trotsky’s house in Coyoacan, the hutches in which the old revolutionary kept rabbits before an ice-pick put an end to him and his innocent pastime.
When the Mexicans eat rabbit, they like to cook it in beer or in Coca-Cola. But when I was offered it the other day, my hostess produced a roasted rabbit with the classic Mexican sauce known as mole. I had been sceptical of mole, imagining a nasty glutinous mixture of bitter chocolate and too many hot chillis. In fact, the sauce was quite thin, made from a paste of several different chillis and a seemingly endless list of other ingredients — almonds, peanuts, pumpkin seeds, raisins, cinnamon, cumin, marjoram, cloves and chocolate. It was surprisingly good, quite delicate in flavour and well matched with the slightly gamey taste of the rabbit.
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