The death of Maïté, lively cathodic chef of “La Cuisine des mousquetaires”

She was the face, the voice, the silhouette, in short, the ambassador of a gastronomic tradition from the South-West, invigorating and tasty, whose king ingredients are duck fat and armagnac. Chef Marie-Thérèse Ordonez, better known as Maïté, died on Saturday December 21, at the age of 86, in Rion-des-Landes (Landes), the village where she was born. With her, a whole page in the history of French television disappears.

“Me, as the other says, I'm angry, and I can't do anything about it, that's how it is. » This personality with a strong temperament was spotted in the early 1980s by a director, Patrice Bellot, attracted by the dishes that the restaurateur had prepared for the Rion-des-Landes rugby team. In her show La Cuisine des mousquetaires, which she presented from 1983 to 1997 on FR3 Aquitaine, FR3 then France 3, Maïté cooked up hundreds of recipes, then collected in cookbooks which sold tens of thousands of copies.

In a twelve-minute format that she hosted with her accomplice, the producer Micheline Banzet-Lawton (1923-2020), the Gascon cooked some of the richest and most delicious dishes of French gastronomy, becoming a transmitter of heritage culinary. With a particular appetite for the delicacies of his region, land of the musketeers of Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870), himself a great lover of good food.

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