His recipe books, embellished with duck fat and his legendary “tear” of Armagnac, have sold thousands of copies.
Anthology scenes… bloody
It was during a sports report that she caught the eye of a director, Patrice Bellot. When she sings “La Dacquoise” while serving parsley potatoes, and the walls tremble, he is won over: he stars in her “Cuisine of the Mousquetaires”, a series project launched by Micheline Banzet, former concert performer turned producer at FR3.
The idea is to resurrect d'Artagnan's cuisine by drawing on Alexandre Dumas' “The Great Dictionary of Cuisine”. In a rural kitchen where the fire crackles, a rifle hung on the fireplace and a copper saucepan hanging from the wall, Maïté will prepare old-fashioned dishes completely out of step with the habits of the time, supported by Micheline Banzet-Lawton, who died in 2020.
With her hair brushed, her immaculate blouse protected by a large apron, Maïté shoots several anthology scenes: by the light of a candle, we see her “suck the butt” of an ortolan, peel a beef tongue, scratch the neck of a live chicken before finishing it off with a hatchet; or bleed, pluck and cut the breasts of a duck, before preparing “a sanguette” with the fresh blood of the webfoot.
With her large knife, she pierces the legs of the wild boar that is brought to her, hangs it from a ladder and nimbly cuts it up. “It’s quite an art,” she assures, calmly cutting up a leg of lamb. If you ever make wild boar, buy it ready-made. It is, in general, a man's job! “. But she barely sweats as she pierces the thigh with her spit.
“It’s the kitchen of miracles”
We feel that she is less at ease with seafood: she happily confuses mussels and oysters, and has to try several times with her pestle to knock out an eel – “What not to do? do to earn a crust! » – or dipping prawns in Armagnac to kill them – “They are drunk, the bitches, the sluts! “.
“For me, the cuisine of the Mousquetaires 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.”
His honeymoon with television ended at the end of the 1990s after quarrels within the “La Cuisine des Mousquetaires” team. Retired in her native village, Maïté definitively abandons the small screen. In 2015, his restaurant was placed in liquidation.
A “source of inspiration for so many families” according to Macron
“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 about her: she's like on TV! And that’s what explains the affection we had for her,” Laurent Civel, mayor of the village since 2014, told AFP.
“Ambassador of our traditional cuisine, popular icon, source of inspiration for so many families, Maïté, who so well embodied the art of being French, is no more,” greeted President Emmanuel Macron on the social network , sending his condolences to his loved ones “and to all those who enjoyed listening to him”.
