How to make Rouille properly

Grilled rabbits and rosé. Supper in Provence.

---

The window(s) from the vast cool kitchen where I stand looking out over rows of neatly gnarled olive trees that disappear somewhere far away into the haze of azure blue. Fields of bright purple with the muted green of lavender, where the sky gets forgotten as it meets the cobalt of the ocean, bask in the dazzling glare of the sun, whose lustre has inspired so many for so long.

Somewhere in the far distance if you journey down the little winding coastal roads, through sun baked rocky outcrops and the warm smell of maquis that is everywhere, then somewhere across the sea is the northern coast of Corsica with its beaches of white sand and pine trees, another place where I can get lost in thought for days amongst forests and mountains.

I should quite like to be there now.

The heat outside is stifling as the late afternoon in rural Provence leads into early evening, the day’s warmth building since early this morning shows little in the way of respite. The conditioned air of the old farmhouse swirls around the stone floors and keeps us all cool here. Outside in the heat a bell will soon ring from the chapel to announce the hour, and then it will soon be dinner time as it has been for hundreds of years here in this place of tall sandy stone walls and bright bougainvillea. Cicadas click and clatter nearby and the smell from the hot bark of resinous trees pervades the early evening, warm from the endless days and years stood in the sunshine, the smell of the curling, lazy woodsmoke from the brazier that stands by an ancient wall, crumbling in places in the courtyard of the grand old stone farmhouse tucked far away in the sleepy hot hills of the Provence, where the air is heady with the smell of the forest. Rock roses, wild lavender, thyme and rosemary grow for mile upon mile up here in the garrigue. Holm oaks, Stone pines, Cork trees and Broom, bask under the sun with the warmed oils of fennel and sage that you crush beneath your feet as you walk through the scrub and stony dry soil of the maquis that surrounds us here.

A pair of fat rabbits, split open, rubbed with wild herbs, threaded onto a pair of crossed long olive-wood sticks that have been trimmed and sharpened neatly with my Opinel No 7, (the second I’ve owned, bought from a market stall in a nearby village after my first one disappeared in a pine forest, lost during an impromptu picnic for a chap who you’d certainly have heard of, along with his latest girlfriend, their entourage of guests, hangers-on and omnipresent security to ward away the unwelcome).