PATRICK BERNARD / AFP
Marie-Thérèse Ordonez, better known as Maïté, who hosted successful culinary shows for fifteen years, including “La Cuisine des Mousquetaires”, died on December 21, 2024.
KITCHEN – A scene of animal abuse that left its mark. The cook Maïté, host of The Kitchen of the Musketeers from 1983 to 1997 then At the table from 1995 to 1999 on France 3, died this Saturday, December 21 at the age of 86, leaving behind television moments that have become cult, such as that of “the eel”.
If you are too young to remember this sequence, you can view below this archive of the National Audiovisual Institute. We see the truculent Landes woman using her pestle several times to knock out an eel.
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“I'm going to knock it out but otherwise we have to cut it all around and then we peel it.”explains the cook to her partner Micheline Banzet-Lawton, who died in 2020. But the eel, nicknamed the “chip” or « the doe » by Maïté, does not give in and tries to escape from her hands. Maïté strikes and plagues: “Come here my darling, you won’t get my skin!” ». And it's not over, once the animal is dead, the two women each take a piece of the eel to peel it.
“Give hello to the eel!” »
A relentlessness which made viewers laugh a lot at the time. Today on X (formerly Twitter), Internet users joked about the eel that Maïté “will be found in paradise”, as you can see in the tweets below.
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In her long career as a cook-host, Maïté has not only tackled eels. On TV, with her large knife, she also pierces the legs of the wild boar that is brought to her, hangs it from a ladder and nimbly dismembers it. “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.
“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”.
Her granddaughter Camille followed in her footsteps by becoming a cook, participating in the television show Objectif Top Chef in 2018. In 2023, the media News Landes had indicated that Maïté was suffering from “neurodegenerative disease”. She ended her days at the Rion-des-Landes nursing home.
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