Maïté was best known for having hosted, from 1983 to 1997, the culinary show La Cuisine des Mousquetaires with Micheline Banzet-Lawton.
In the summer of 2006, she welcomed us into her restaurant. Reread the article by our colleague Renée Mourgues below.
She ran a restaurant in Rion-des-Landes.
Nicolas Sabathier
It takes more than two weeks to reserve a table at “Chez Maïté”, in Rion-des-Landes, in the restaurant that looks like a roadside inn where gourmets from France and elsewhere hope to be able to congratulate, photograph or film the one of the most popular cordon bleus in the region.
“Maïté” Ordoñez née Badet, 68 years old, got used to this popularity while feigning amazement at the media coverage that fell on her in the heart of the 1980s and never left her again.
“I’m always surprised when people mistake me for someone,” she says without laughing. She modestly attributes her notoriety to “luck”. Above all, there were opportune encounters seduced by the extraordinary personality of the buxom Landaise with her fleeting words that words betray when she feels pushed to her most secret corners.
The third in a family of five girls and two boys, Maïté's only education was Rionese primary school. “My peasant parents grew corn. We didn't have a penny but we lived very happily. We were three neighbors. After the war, each house took turns making bread stuffed with belly or ham and that was enough for us.”
Barely out of childhood, she was hired as a worker in the village wood factory. “I carried boards on pallets for a pittance of pay.” At sixteen, the teenager went to “do the maid” with rich Landes residents living in Paris.
Later, she returned to the country to marry “Pierrot” with whom she had only one son. “I returned to the SNCF to prepare meals for the railway workers without having learned to cook. One day, the mayor of Rion asked me to open a restaurant and it all started like that.”
Patois fluently
Since then, nothing, not even the aura of the “Kitchen of the Musketeers” whose programs broadcast on the public channel were recorded in Rion, has kept him away from his sweet home for long. “The family is a core. If one is missing, it's not okay! We always took care of each other. It's in us. It's innate. We help each other a lot. This is of capital importance! » insists the sonorous voice.
Maïté is not a woman to discuss her roots. Thus, she will never invoke Occitan or Gascon to designate “the patois” which she handles to perfection when she converses with the elders. “My grandparents and parents spoke it fluently but when I was young, it was considered a disgrace.”
Leaving the emphasis to others, she decrees that “you have to know how to stay at your level”.
Courted by journalists, she trusts her brash nature to satisfy their curiosity. “I’m not planning anything. I don't repeat. It's spontaneous. I don’t know how to do otherwise.”
Made for work
Cooking is the only area that makes it inexhaustible. “It’s so easy to delight others! Foie gras, stuffed duck breast, sauces… I don’t spend time decorating my dishes. All that matters is what's on the plate. In the southwest, we have the best products: beef from Chalosse, fatted ducks, vegetables from Dax. I like simple but good things! This is paradise. There is everything to be happy. We live well there even if we work a lot,” she exclaims.
A celebrity inducted or invited many times, Maïté responds less and less to the countless requests even if we see her, this year, on the route of the Tour de France between Cambo-les-Bains and Pau. Free, she only recognizes the chains of family and work, both intimately intertwined.
“Some people are made for love. I was made for work,” she laughs to punctuate the interview.
