Marie-Thérèse Ordonez, better known as Maïté, who hosted successful culinary shows for fifteen years on television, including “La Cuisine des Mousquetaires”, died this Saturday, December 21, we learned from the mayor of Rion-des-Landes, his native village.
3 mins
It was late in life, approaching fifty, that Maïte made her first television debut, in 1983, hosting “La Cuisine des Mousquetaires” with her singing accent on France 3 alongside Micheline Banzet-Lawton. Before TV, Maïté worked for 22 years as an announcer for the SNCF in her native Landes region. She was responsible for alerting, using a trumpet, the railway workers before a train arrived, so that they would give it passage. It was also during a report on the Rion-des-Landes rugby team that director Patrice Bellot discovered Maïté, who also used to cook for the players.
His media career, which began in the early 1980s and ended in 1999, led him to host a show on Sud Radio and to regularly appear in other shows, documentaries and fiction. She has also often lent her image to several brands in advertising clips, such as for Bonux laundry detergent, where her intervention was punctuated by a line that has become cult: “It doesn’t say woodcock here!” “.
In 1988, Maïté opened her first restaurant in Rion, in which the recordings of her shows took place. She ended up closing this first establishment before opening another in the same city, Chez Maïté, which was liquidated in April 2015. In 1995, she played the leading role in the comedy “Le Fabuleux Destin de madame Petlet”. The books, VHS tapes and DVD discs in which she detailed her recipes, often embellished with duck fat and a legendary “tear” of Armagnac, sold thousands of copies.
Aged 86, Maïté retired to a nursing home in Rion-des-Landes. Forty years after “The Kitchen of the Musketeers”, entire generations of viewers have remembered certain colorful passages, such as a very particular tasting of ortolan or a recipe during which one had to be knocked out, using a mortar pestle, a recalcitrant eel to say the least.
“ For Rion, and well beyond, it is the disappearance of a French woman to whom we were all attached, and even identified, with her good nature, her truculence. People said about her: she’s like on TV! And that’s what explains the affection we had for her », declared Laurent Civel, mayor of the village.
“ For me, the cuisine of the Musketeers is the cuisine of miracles “, she said in the 1980s. “ I was nothing, nothing, nothing. I left school at 14, I was a worker, a woman like everyone else. Even less than everyone else and with this new life, I went from rooster to donkey “.