Made by reducing some vinegar with shallots, cut in eighth of an inch squares, and adding to it two or three spoonfuls of white bread-crumbs lightly fried in butter and some good gravy. Let the sauce cook for ten minutes on the side of the range, season to taste, and finish with some chopped parsley and lemon juice.
Ranhofer gives proportions for almost nothing here, which is typical of the sauce chapter in The Epicurean — the book assumes a kitchen with stock, gravy and clarified butter already at hand. A workable reading follows.
The Epicurean (1894) was Charles Ranhofer's summation of more than thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its sauce chapter reads like an inventory of the international repertoire a large American hotel kitchen was expected to produce on demand — hence a run of entries here alphabetized from White Sauce through York to Zuchette. Sauces named for English places and titles were a fixture of nineteenth-century French professional cookery, and York, associated with cured ham, tends to attach to sharp, vinegar-and-shallot preparations meant for pork; the attribution is conventional rather than documented, and no single English original for a "sauce d'York" is firmly recorded. Thickening with bread rather than a roux has a long history in English cookery, bread sauce being the familiar survival, though the link between that tradition and this particular entry is suggestive rather than documented.