The Sour-tasting Bread & The Belgian Connection

'Nestor Pirrot with Guadalajara's famed birrote bread – created by his virtual namesake, Camille Pirrote, during the French occupation of Mexico.' - Photo By J. Hepp

In 1949, 22-year-old Nestor Pirrot came across a peculiar magazine. Although he had just returned to Belgium from military service in the Congo, the stories about La Malinche, Chichen Itza and Cortez in the tiny bi-weekly magazine about all things Mexico seemed more fantastic than anything he could have dreamed. Imagine his delight when he discovered the story of a sargeant in the French army with a last name strikingly similar to his own ... Camille Pirrotte.

"At that point I wasn't even dreaming that I'd be in Guadalajara one day," says Pirrot, who has now been living here for 28 years. His penchant for languages – French, Spanish, Dutch, German, Portugues, Italian, and English – allowed him to travel to the corners of the earth with his engineering job. After experiencing places like Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Aruba and Buenos Aires, he was finally assigned to a post here in Guadalajara.
Throughout all his travels, Nestor Pirrot never completely forgot about his countryman, Sargeant Pirrote.

"When I arrived in Guadalajara I read several articles on the subject," says Pirrot. "Some of them were pretty close to reality, but some of them were wrong, so I decided to do more of my own research."

Over the years he read what he could about the man responsible for bringing the famous birrote bread to Guadalajara. In his research he discovered that, although they are not directly related, they both came from Verviers, a small town in the French-speaking region of Belgium. He was also able to put together a pretty solid story.

On January 6, 1864, Camille Pirrote, a Belgian volunteer in the French Army arrived in Guadalajara just in time for the occupation of the city.

Thanks to a not-so-brilliant move by Napoleon Bonaparte, Mexico was under French control with an Austrian emperor, Maximilian I. Part of the emperor's grand scheme to win over the hearts of the Mexican people was to enlist the troops in teaching French culture and customs. Maximilian would later meet death by firing squad, but Mexico was bequeathed bread, mariachis and fine furniture.

Camille Pirrote was charged with teaching the locals to make French bread, but not long after he set up shop in a house near avenidas Vallarta and Juarez, he realized that he couldn't find yeast anywhere in the city. He improvised and left the dough out to ferment for a few days, which turned out to be a fine substitute. He began to give away day-old pieces of baked bread to the growing legions of poor in the city and the crusty slightly sour-tasting bread took the city by storm.

When the French were finally ousted in 1867, soldiers were given the option of returning home or maintaining residence in Mexico. Pirotte caught wind of the news of a passenger ship that was scheduled to make a special stop in San Jeronimo to pick up French and Belgian soldiers before rounding South America and heading back to Europe. He made the trip to San Jeronimo, but the ship never did. Disheartened but not defeated, Pirotte moved back to Guadalajara and opened up his own bread shop. He eventually married a Tapatia and took her last name, Garcia. And that, according to Nestor Pirot, is the reason why Camille Pirotte disappeared into relative obscurity.

At some point – Nestor Pirot hasn't quite worked out this detail yet –Pirrote turned into Birote, and now the bread is the essential ingredient for one of Guadalajara's most famous dishes, the torta ahogada.
There are many different versions of this story. Most maintain that Birrote was French and some say he was actually Maximilian's palace baker, but Nestor Pirrot will likely stick to his own version.

"I'm not a historian or a researcher. I'm an engineer," Pirrot says. "I do have to recognize that my interest in learning is due to the fact that our names were the same."