Gilmore Girls' Scott Patterson launches first cookbook
Scott Patterson has spent years being asked about coffee, burgers and the food served at the iconic Luke’s Diner.
Now the Gilmore Girls star is finally doing something about it, and he has released his first cookbook.
Patterson, best known to fans as the gruff (but secretly soft-hearted) Luke Danes, has published Dishes from the Diner: Classic All-Day Recipes.
It's a collection of more than 90 recipes inspired by his childhood in New Jersey’s diner culture and his time playing the owner of Stars Hollow’s favourite meeting place.
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Thankfully, this is not a cookbook filled exclusively with coffee and attitude.
The recipes include diner staples such as tuna melts, cheeseburgers and Cobb salad, alongside dishes that will be instantly recognisable to Gilmore Girls fans.
There are Extra-Chocolaty Chocolate Breakup Pancakes, Special Four-Slice French Toast and The Yale Special.
What is the special exactly? A sausage wrapped in a pancake and tied together with bacon.
There is also Founders Day Punch and Norman Mailer Iced Tea, giving the book plenty of little winks to the show without turning it into a novelty cookbook.
For Patterson, the connection between his acting career and food was hardly a stretch.
“I've always been a foodie,” the 67-year-old actor told PEOPLE.
“I love diner food. I think it is the very definition of comfort food, and being on a show that is the very definition of a comfort show, I think it was just a natural progression and a perfect match.”
Patterson grew up around diners in Southern New Jersey, long before he was pulling pints of coffee behind Luke’s counter.
That background gave him a useful familiarity with the food and atmosphere he would later recreate on screen.
“Playing a diner owner on TV is a very good job,” he said. “It's important to have a central hub where all of the characters congregate on a pretty regular basis, and that really anchors the show.”
Anyone who has watched Gilmore Girls knows Luke’s Diner was considerably more than somewhere to grab breakfast.
It was where Lorelai and Rory drank alarming quantities of coffee, where Luke dispensed unsolicited advice, and where half of Stars Hollow seemed to wander through at some point.
Patterson believes that sense of familiarity is part of why the series continues to attract viewers nearly two decades after its original run ended.
“It's so accessible,” he said. “It's so funny, there's so many great jokes in there, and they're smart, and they're fast.”
The actor also pointed to the show's unusually large cast of distinctive characters as one of its enduring strengths.
The cookbook therefore works on two levels.
For Gilmore Girls devotees, the titles and references offer a chance to revisit favourite moments through food.
For anyone else, it is a collection of hearty, unfussy American diner recipes designed for breakfast, lunch or dinner.
Essentially, this is the sort of food Luke would probably begrudgingly approve of.
Patterson has also seen first-hand how much the series still means to its audience.
He described Luke as 'the gift that keeps on giving', recalling fans who tell him they still watch the show constantly.
“They have it on all the time,” he confessed.
“I meet the husbands and they say, ‘She's got it on all the time, she falls asleep to you, by the way, Scott.’ I'm like, ‘I can't help that, I'm sorry.’
Dishes from the Diner: Classic All-Day Recipes is out now, and this is probably the closest fans are going to get to taking a little piece of Stars Hollow home, preferably with a very large coffee on the side.
Jen Thomas