MADELINE: So there’s only gonna be one seventy-fourth anniversary issue ever and we didn’t do anything special for it.
LOUISE: I think the cover was of a deep-fried Mars bar.
A deep-fried Mars Bar is one which has been battered then deep-fried in oil. The dish has been claimed as originating at a chip shop in Stonehaven, Scotland in 1992, although this has been disputed, with others saying it had been sold elsewhere in Scotland in the 1980s. It became a media sensation in the mid-1990s and through the early 2000s as a symbol of unhealthy eating.
The dish isn’t common in the US, and the American Mars Bar is not the same as the one sold in the UK. The Mars Bar sold everywhere else in the world is caramel and nougat coated with milk chocolate. The US version is nougat and almonds covered in milk chocolate. At some point which nobody seems able to identify, caramel got added in there, but the bar was discontinued in 2002. When it was brought back in 2016, it was the “original” recipe without caramel.
Presumably the Franklin was covering the deep-fried Mars Bar as part of the media interest in it.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 