Maïté, cook and entertainer, died at the age of 86

She had marked television with her recipes and her character. Maïté, whose real name is Marie-Thérèse Ordonez, died in the night from Friday to Saturday at the age of 86, the mayor of Rion-des-Landes told AFP, following an illness. neurodegenerative.

“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.

A former announcer at SNCF, she became famous by hosting the show “La Cuisine des mousquetaires” on France 3 alongside Micheline Banzet from 1983 to 1997, then “A table”, from 1997 to 1999.

Spotted during a documentary on rugby

Patrice Bellot, a director from Bordeaux, who came to make a documentary on the Rion-des-Landes rugby team, discovered the picturesque Maité, then aged 45, who prepared their meals for them. He offers to host the cooking show.

At the same time, the Gascon woman delighted in her talents in the kitchen, at banquets and weddings in her region. She opened two restaurants, Le Relais des Landes in 1988, then Chez Maïté, before bowing out in the mid-2010s.

Unbelievable and cult sequences

The cordon bleu of FR3 causes a sensation with its banter and its generous and authentic gastronomy which gives rise to incredible sequences, like the one where Maïté teaches the tasting of ortolan. “I start to take him and suck his behind,” explains the good-natured girl crudely. Gastronomes are still shuddering. Gourmets still remember the way she spiced up her preparations with a “tear of Armagnac”.

Even if she had since bowed out, her time on television had marked a generation. And extracts published by the INA on social networks, such as its giant hamburger with duck breast or its massacre of a poor eel with a rolling pin, had continued to make it known among younger people.

“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”.