Maïté, France's most famous cook, has died at the age of 86

Real name Marie-Thérèse Ordonez, Maïté died in the Landes nursing home where she lived.

She will remain one of the major faces of television, offering her best recipes on television for more than ten years in the show “La Cuisine des Mousquetaires”.

Her outspokenness and soft Southwestern accent helped make her a major media figure. Marie-Thérèse Ordonez, known to the French more simply as Maïté, died during the night from Friday to Saturday at the age of 86.

The information was confirmed to TF1 by the director of the nursing home where the octogenarian resided, who had never left his native Landes. Often imitated but never equaled, this gastronomy enthusiast made her television debut in the early 1980s to offer her best recipes.

Local ambassador

Maïté hosted “La Cuisine des Mousquetaires” with Micheline Banzet-Lawton, from 1983 to 1997, then invited viewers to “À Table” from 1995 to 1999, still on France 3. The opportunity for her to promote the local Landes products that were dear to him. For the 100th anniversary of her show, she even tasted a fast-food hamburger after making her own with gizzards, strips of duck breast and hot foie gras. Others will remember the number where an eel gave him a hard time.

Her popularity had extended beyond the small screen, leading this former SNCF employee to open her own restaurant in the early 1990s in her village of Rion-des-Landes. She had sold the operation of “Chez Maïté” to her daughter-in-law before the establishment closed its doors in 2015 after judicial liquidation. His recipe books decorated with duck fat and his legendary Armagnac “tear” have sold thousands of copies.

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“It is for Rion, and well beyond, the disappearance of a French woman to whom we were all attached, and even identified, with her good nature, her truculence. People said of her: she is like a TV! And that explains the affection we had for her.”declared to AFP Laurent Civel, mayor of the village since 2014. Currently in Djibouti after a turbulent passage in Mayotte, Emmanuel Macron greeted on (new window) a “ambassador of our traditional cuisine, popular icon, source of inspiration for so many families” qui “embodied the art of being French so well”.