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Baseball Soup

Our legendary cartoonist, my buddy Randy Enos, loves kale soup with bugs.

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–Daryl


In 1993, a former illustrator, named Pam Sommers, asked 84 well known illustrators to contribute to a book she was putting together called “Recipes for Disaster“. In essence, she wanted the illustrators to write out and then illustrate their favorite recipes. Some of the artists chose to take a conceptual approach such as a “recipe for a riot”. We had complete freedom to interpret “recipe” any way we wanted to but most of us did actual recipes of our favorite dish. I was one of those and I decided to combine my text and picture into one linocut illustration. The words became part of the picture.

My favorite food dish is Portuguese kale soup. It’s nickname is “baseball soup” because of the large baseball sized potatoes in it. It also blends the flavors of the Portuguese sausages, chourico and linguica with cabbage, lima and red kidney beans and soup chuck with the large bunch of kale. It’s a thick soup, almost like a stew sometimes although some people, like my Aunt Angie used to make a thinner watery version of it. My father and mom taught my wife, Leann how to make it and she does a PERFECT replica of the version I grew up with … except for the bugs floating in it. You see, we grew our own kale in a little garden in our yard and it was impossible for my grandmother, who lived with us and did most of the cooking, to wash out all these tiny little bugs that were embedded in the kale leaves. So, they got well cooked into the soup. When you were eating it, you could see the tiny little critters who looked like fruit flies floating in the lovely greenish soup. The first time Leann ate at our house and saw the bugs, she was a little put off by them. My father assured her that they were well cooked and perfectly harmless.

I love kale soup. It is truly the best dish I have ever eaten in my life… it’s heaven. And it is truly delicious the days after it is created when the flavors have mingled and steeped. We always make a very big pot of it that lasts a few days.

I decided to do my illustration in a whaling theme because the largest concentration of Portuguese immigrants are located in my home town of New Bedford which was the greatest 17, 18 and 19th century American whaling port in the world. I decided that I would depict whalemen trying to harpoon two large potato/whales. One whaleman shouts, “Baleia Branco”… which means “white whales”,referencing Moby Dick which was written by Herman Melville who shipped out of New Bedford on a whaling ship when he was 25 years old and later wrote probably the greatest novel ever written.

The water, in my picture, is composed of the wavy lettering that makes up the recipe text. White on black at the top of the picture listing the ingredients and black lettering on white in the larger bottom part of the picture listing the cooking procedure.

It was a lot of work and it was very very tiring cutting all those letters backwards… BUT, well worth it for KALE SOUP!


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Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Baseball Soup

The Lady with the Mustache

The Rest is History

Randall Enos Decade!

Never Put Words in Your Pictures

Explosion In A Blue Jeans Factory

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Happy Times in the Morgue

I was the Green Canary

Born in a Volcano

When I was a Famous Chinese Watercolorist

My Most Unusual Art Job

A Duck Goes Into a Grocery Store

A Day With Jonathan Winters and Carol Burnett

Illustrating the Sea

Why I Started Drawing

The Fastest Illustrator in the World!

Me and the GhostBusters

The Bohemian Bohemian

Take it Off … Take it ALL Off!

I Eat Standing Up

The Funniest Cartoon I’ve Ever Seen

The Beatles had a Few Good Tunes

Andy Warhol Meets King Kong

Jacques and the Cowboy

The Gray Lady (The New York Times)

The BIG Eye

Historic Max’s

The Real Moby Dick

The Norman Conquests

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

How to Murder Your Wife

I Yam What I Yam

The Smallest Cartoon Characters in the World

Chicken Gutz

Brought to You in Living Black and White

The Hooker and the Rabbit

Art School Days in the Whorehouse

The Card Trick that Caused a Divorce

The Mysterious Mr. Quist

Monty Python Comes to Town

Riding the Rails

The Pyramid of Success

The Day I Chased the Bus

The Other Ol’ Blue Eyes

8th Grade and Harold von Schmidt

Rembrandt of the Skies

The Funniest Man I’ve Ever Known

Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part One”

Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part Two”

Famous Artists Visit the Famous Artists School

Randy Remembers Tomi Ungerer

Randy’s Overnight Parade

The Bullpen

Famous Artists Schools

Dik Browne: Hot Golfer

Randy and the National Lampoon

Randy’s Only Great Idea

A Brief Visit to Outer Space

Enos, Love and Westport

Randy Remembers the NCS

Categories
Blog

Welcome Cristina Sampaio!

We just added a new cartoonist to our CagleCartoons.com newspaper syndicate and our Cagle.com site! Cristina Sampaio, the charming and brilliant cartoonist from Portugal. Here are a few samples of her work. Just another great reason for newspaper to subscribe to our syndicate! Read more about Cagle.com here.

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Blog

World Press Cartoons Contest Winners

The World Press Cartoon contest just announced their winners. This contest is run from Portugal and has the biggest prizes, putting it at the top of the heap for world cartoon contests. I’m pleased that the grand prize winner this year is Shankar Parmathy, a brilliant, young caricaturist in Hyderabad, India. I met Shankar on my speaking tour in India and he contributes cartoons occasionally to Politicalcartoons.com (we need more cartoons from you, Shankar). Here’s Shankar’s lovely, grand prize winning portrait of Nelson Mandela.

ShankarMandela

Mandela is black, but his fist is pink – a Caucasian fist; I’m not quite sure what Shankar means by that, but it shows diversity, so I suppose that’s good.

This contest is in three parts, editorial cartoons, humor cartoons and caricatures; one of those division winners wins the grand prize, as Shankar did with his caricature. Often the winners are incomprehensible to an American eye. One year the winner was a depiction of the EU as the tower of Babel from an old painting – I had to have it explained to me – I didn’t know the old painting and I didn’t understand the EU reference. Caricature winners are sometimes soccer players that an American would never recognize. Even when I understand these winning cartoons, they can be strange. Here is this year’s humor category winner, by Agim Sulaj, an artist from Albania.

HumorWinner

 

This could be a photo of a sculpture, but I’d guess it is a realistic painting of a loaf of bread with a drawer containing coins. I suppose that’s funny. Nobody’s going to look there for your money, kind of like those fake rocks where you can hide your keys. Maybe it’s a “can’t have your bread and eat it too” cartoon, because you spent your money for the bread, but you’re keeping it too – but you can’t eat the bread, because it’s really a drawer. Maybe.

The editorial cartoon category winner, by cartoonist Zarko Luetic of Croatia, shows a banker greeting a guy with the European Union logo on his suit, with someone who is poor (indicated by patches on his gray unitard) who is being flung into the air by a casual flip of the hat from the EU guy, who is greeting the banker back.

HumorWonner2

 

As I read this one, the bankers and the European Union are are so unaware of the plight of the poor that they don’t even notice that they are flinging the poor around as they show, in contrast, that they are aware of each other by greeting each other. And they cast long shadows.

Alternatively, the banker may be noticing that the poor guy in the unitard is flying by, just about to steal the EU guy’s hat – the EU isn’t aware that his hat is about to be stolen by that darn, flying poor guy, but the EU will know in just a second what the banker already knows. The shadow shows us the poor guy is really there, not a figment of their imaginations. I guess that’s OK. Those darn poor are always demanding our attention, when we’d rather greet our powerful friends.

I think that’s right.

 

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Euro Toilet

Euro-Toilet © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,economy,finance,economy,European Union,Greece,Portugal,Spain,Euro,Europe