“At the funeral of the Queen of Oude, a diadem was placed on her brow,” read a story in the Baltimore Daily Exchange in 1858. The short report, filed under “Foreign Miscellany,” focused on jewels, describing “a necklace of lapiz lazuli round her neck, and circlets of amber round her arms and legs. A number of amulets were also attached to the covering in which her body was enveloped.”
Throughout Europe and the United States, newspapers reported on the Paris funeral, which the Fayetteville Semi-Weekly Observer in North Carolina dubbed “a rare spectacle for the pageant-loving population of that great metropolis.”
“The crowd of curious spectators was so great that it was almost impossible for the procession to move along,” the Observer observed. For years afterward, fashion columns reported that ladies in Paris and London emulated the tasseled silk scarves worn by Malika Kishwar, the last Queen of Oude.
The story of how Kishwar ended up dying in Paris, to be buried in the world-famous Père Lachaise cemetery along with Chopin, Oscar Wilde, and Jim Morrison, is a rather sad footnote in the story of British colonialism in India. Obviously, that history is too involved for my little food blog.
Located in the present-day region of Uttar Pradesh, Oude (alternately spelled Oudh, Avadh, or Awadh) was a princely state in India, meaning it wasn’t directly ruled by the British. When enab Aliya Begum aka Malika Kishwar was born in the city of Lucknow, around 1805, the British were in the business of intervening to appoint government officials, and demanding revenue from the kingdom, while also gradually placing regions of the state under more direct rule.
In 1847, Kishwar’s son Wajid (also spelled Wahid) Ali Shah ascended to the throne as King of Awadh. The East India Company was eager to annex the throne. Stories of the King being a “debauched and detached” ruler circulated. They were possibly British propaganda. Wajid Ali Shah is depicted in some accounts as generous, compassionate, devout in prayer, and a patron of the arts and literature. Nonetheless, the East India Company used the pretense of “bad governance” to take over in 1856, exiling the King to Calcutta. This unscrupulous move is cited as one of the main reasons for the Indian uprising of 1857.
When Wahid Ali Shah fell ill and was unable to make the trip to London to plead his case to be reinstated to the throne, Malika Kishwar stepped in.
Newspapers reported with fascination on the Queen, who traveled with a large entourage, including family members and many servants carrying drapery to seclude the queen from public view as per their religious custom.
When Kishwar finally got an audience with the Queen of England, she realized that Queen Victoria queen wasn’t particularly politically involved and that the matter should be pleaded before Parliament. According to a story by Jack Wilson for the Daily Echo in 2021, her petition was dismissed “on the grounds that she had not used the required word “humble”, before the word “petition”, and the word “humbly”, before the word “pray.”
To add insult to injury, Malika Kishwar was denied the right to return home unless she declared herself a British subject. Rather than submit to this humiliation, she headed home via France. In January of 1858 she died and was buried in Paris. In February, the Baltimore Sun reported that “it is said that the Queen of Oude died of grief… The prayers enjoined by the Buddhist religion were said over her death-bed.” This is probably a confusion with Muslim customs.
The name “Queen of Oude Sauce” may have given an air of exoticism to this recipe, which likely originated around the time of Kishwar’s trip to London and subsequent death. The sauce contains generous quantities of cinnamon, cloves, and allspice. The horseradish was a giveaway that this is not an Indian sauce. I confirmed as much with Nandita Godbole, author of many Indian cookbooks and the Curry Cravings Kitchen Blog. “The cider vinegar and horseradish are not old-fashioned Indian ingredients,” she confirmed, “I think this recipe is likely an alteration of something more local to Paris.”
I don’t know how popular this sauce actually was, but I did find a reference to it in a 1930 newspaper, The Morning News in Wilmington Delaware, which ran a column called “Pertinent Questions” by W.H. Hill. “Who was the Queen Oude after an old-time sauce was named?,” asked Hill, before positing how tourists’ money melts like snow, and some confusing joke about spinsters. Kishwar had been forgotten.
Jane Gilmor Howard included a recipe in her 1873 book “Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen,” for “Veritable Oude Sauce Or Chetney (From An Old English Receipt Book).” Hers is a more Indian-inspired mix of onions, tomatoes, a small amount of salt fish, and lots of chili peppers.
Recipes similar to the one I used appeared in newspapers and cookbooks in the 1880s. This one was clipped into a scrapbook compiled by a member of Baltimore’s Merganthaler family in the early 1900s. The document was shared with me by Joyce White, who acquired the notebook for the Maryland State Archives earlier this year.
At its inception, the sauce was surely not so much about honoring Malika Kishwar than about ignorant fascination with the seemingly exotic and foreign. It’s interesting how novel she apparently was to average people in England and the United States, even after centuries of the East India Company extracting wealth and resources from India. For everyday people, it was an invisible and remote influence other than a cup of tea and maybe some spices.
Still, here we are. I’ve now spent hours reading about the East India Company and the Oudh State and the Indian Rebellion of 1857. I’ve also enjoyed this sauce on fish, burgers, and meatballs. And I’ve learned about the life of Malika Kishwar, Queen of Oude… who probably never tasted horseradish in her life. May she rest in peace.
Recipe:
“One peck of sound green tomatoes, 6 green sweet peppers (big ones), 48 onions (silver skins), 2 cupfuls each of salt, sugar and freshly grated horseradish, 2 tablespoonfuls each of ground cloves, allspice and cinnamon. Chop the tomatoes very fine, sprinkle the salt over them and let them stand all night. In the morning pour off the liquid, chop the onions and peppers very fine, mix into the tomatoes, add the sugar, horseradish and spices, and stir all well together. Then put into a kettle, cover with cider vinegar and let it boil slowly until well cooked, thick and tender. Will take several hours, but the best test is the tenderness of the vegetables—must be “cooked to rags.” Bottle and seal while hot or put in small jars.”
Recipe from Merganthaler Recipe Scrapbook, c 1920s, Maryland State Archives
