The French host and restaurateur from the southwest, pioneer of cooking shows, died on December 21, 2025, at the age of 86.
The cook Maïté in her restaurant for the television show “La Cuisine des Mousquetaires”, in 1993 in Rion-des-Landes. Frederic Reglain/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
By Télérama, with AFP
Published on December 21, 2024 at 4:50 p.m.
Updated December 21, 2024 at 5:49 p.m.
Marie-Thérèse Ordonez, better known as Maïté, who hosted successful cooking shows for fifteen years on television, died on Saturday at the age of 86, we learned from the mayor of her native village. The landaise was a figure in local gastronomy, where she performed many traditional dishes for almost twenty years on television.
Pork trotters in salad, foie gras with porcini mushrooms or lamb's head with parsley: this former SNCF employee anima The Kitchen of the Musketeers from 1983 to 1997 then At the table from 1995 to 1999, two very popular shows on France 3.
Maïté was far from being a paragon of the vegetarian diet. His recipe books decorated with duck fat and his legendary Armagnac “tear” have sold thousands of copies. Her outspokenness transformed her into a representative of the region, before she disappeared from the screens at the start of the 21st century.
Resurrecting d'Artagnan's cuisine
When she started on television in 1983, Marie-Thérèse Ordonez ran a restaurant in her village of Rion-des-Landes in the South-West. During a sports report, this peasant girl catches the eye of a director, Patrice Bellot, who will make her the star of his Kitchen of the Musketeersa 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 The Great Cooking Dictionary by Alexandre Dumas. In a rural kitchen, Maïté will prepare old-fashioned dishes, supported by Micheline Banzet-Lawton, who died in 2020.
Maïté shoots several scenes that make the INA video archives a success today: in the light of a candle, we see her “suck the butt” from an ortolan, peel a beef tongue, scratch the neck of a live chicken before finishing it with a hatchet; or bleed, pluck and cut the breasts of a duck, before preparing “a sanguette” with the fresh blood of the webfoot.
His career on television ended at the end of the 1990s. In 2015, his restaurant was placed in liquidation. In 2023, the media Actu Landes indicated that Maïté suffered from a “neurodegenerative disease”. She ended her days at the Rion-des-Landes nursing home.
“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 “and to all those who enjoyed listening to it”.
