Schirripa calls it macaroni in 'A Goomba's Guide to Life'

By HARRY LEVINS
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
"A Goomba's Guide to Life" by Steven R. Schirripa (Potter, $22.95)
You know Steven R. Schirripa as Bobby Bacala, the fat mobster of "The Sopranos." Schirripa knows himself as a goomba -- an Italian-American male of East Coast urban background and a certain way of thinking, acting and eating.
He shares that knowledge is "A Goomba's Guide to Life," a funny little book, and proof in and of itself that ethnic sociology need not be boring.
Much of the book concerns food. Schirripa gives us his recipes, including one for pasta e fagioli. Earlier in the book, he warns us that it's pronounced pasta fazool, "just the way they pronounced it in the Italian neighborhood of my hometown." Without Schirripa's translation, I would never have recognized the formal term pasta e fagioli.
About pasta: "You probably can't get a decent meal any place that's selling 'homemade' pasta," he warns. "Or 'fresh' pasta. No goomba makes his own pasta. And most of them don't call it 'pasta' in the first place. It's macaroni, or it's linguini, or penne, or spaghetti, or whatever. I don't know when macaroni turned into pasta. But it wasn't a goomba that called it that."
A lot of this book reads like an Italian-American version of Jeff Foxworthy's redneck jokes. If you like them (and I do), you'll probably like "Goomba," even when it tiptoes toward the politically incorrect.
But the book is funny, and the recipes sound good, too.