With her legendary duck fat and her “tear” of Armagnac, Marie-Thérèse Ordonez was far from being a model of dietary virtue, but her energetic good humor transformed her into a muse of authenticity and terroir.
Gastronomic companies, producers, caterers, wine growers, everyone snatched it up before it disappeared from the screens at the dawn of the 21st century. His recipe books have sold thousands of copies.
When she started on television in 1983, Marie-Thérèse Ordonez was well known in her village of Rion-des-Landes in the South-West, where she was born on June 2, 1938. This peasant daughter ran a restaurant there where hunter banquets rival the “third halves” of rugby teams.
Ortolan and beef tongue
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 des 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 “sucking the butt” of an ortolan, peeling a beef tongue, scratching 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 one day you make wild boar, buy it ready-made. It’s, in general, a man’s job!” But she barely sweats as she pierces the thigh with her spit.
“Like everyone else”
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's not to like?” do to earn a living!” – 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 I was a worker, a woman like everyone else, even less than everyone else, and with this new life, I went from a rooster to a 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.
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 Actu Landes indicated that Maïté suffered from a “neurodegenerative disease”. She ended her days at the Rion-des-Landes nursing home.
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