Sometime in the early 1990s, Claudio Grossi went up into the attic of his farmhouse near Parma to clean, and came down holding a sack of seeds he couldn’t name. Grossi had grown grain his whole life. He had never seen anything like these, dry and cracked and oddly shaped, and nobody had ever mentioned they were up there.
He guessed they had come down through the family from his great-grandfather, who began farming this land around 1915. With nothing much to lose, he scattered them over a manure pile and waited.
They came up!
Seven ears on one stalk
What grew was taller than any wheat he knew, about six feet, roughly twice the height of a modern field. And the stalks didn’t end in a single ear of grain, the way wheat is supposed to. They split. Up to seven ears fanned off one stem, heavy with kernels that weren’t even all the same color.
Grossi went looking for it in his agricultural books and found nothing. He found it in Genesis instead. In Pharaoh’s second dream, seven ears of grain, full and good, grow on one stalk, and seven thin ones rise after them and swallow them up. Joseph reads it as seven years of plenty followed by seven of famine, and Egypt starts filling its granaries.
If people grew wheat like this in biblical times, Grossi wondered, why was nobody growing it now? He gave it a name to match the feeling: grano del miracolo, miracle wheat.
What the old baker knew
The miracle had a catch. Bread made from it wouldn’t rise properly, at least not the modern way. So Grossi took his flour to an elderly baker nearby who still worked dough with his hands instead of a machine, and the two of them started experimenting. The answer was the opposite of what you’d expect: the grain rose best when it was barely kneaded at all. The loaves came out fragrant and nutty.
In the field it was even more generous. It held up through dry spells that hurt commercial wheat, and it grew so tall it shaded out its own weeds. Grossi found he needed no fertilizer and no herbicide. Its height is its one weak spot, since wind, heavy rain and hail can knock tall stalks flat before harvest, so he plants it alongside shorter varieties that help hold it up.
His timing was good. Italy’s slow food movement was gaining ground in the 1990s, and people wanted exactly this kind of grain back on the table. Grossi eventually teamed up with Molino Grassi, a family mill in Parma, and the grain now goes into a Miracolo flour sold to bakeries, pizzerias and home bakers, in the United States too.
A wheat with a paper trail
Years later, a University of Parma food science student named Beniamino Perobelli bought a loaf of miracle grain bread at a local supermarket and got curious. Working with the lab of professor Teofilo Vamerali, he identified it as Triticum turgidum, literally “swollen wheat,” the family botanists also call poulard or rivet wheat. Their tests found it richer in phosphorus and iron than modern wheat, with less gluten.
As it turns out, the grain had a long and well-documented life before the attic. Pliny the Elder described a branched wheat he called Triticum ramosum. By the 1800s it carried a whole bouquet of folk names in Italy, among them grain of abundance and miracle grain, and old farmers around Parma remember it growing there. When Vilmorin-Andrieux catalogued the best wheats of its day in 1880, Eugène Graff painted it on cream paper alongside its single-eared poulard cousins. Those plates are the pictures in this story.
Not everyone was a fan. An Italian farm journal in 1900 judged miracle wheat more of a curiosity than a crop worth recommending, and shorter, machine-friendly wheats crowded it out over the century that followed. Today the region of Emilia-Romagna lists it in its official register of local heritage varieties, and Italy’s national agricultural research agency keeps small stocks of its seed for farmers who want to try it.
Is it really the wheat from the Bible?
Probably not in the way the story wants. Branched wheat has been tangled up with Egypt for a long time. In the 1840s an English poet reported sprouting seeds from a sealed jar said to be three thousand years old, and they grew branched ears. French botanists later told a similar tale about seeds from a tomb. The names “mummy wheat” and “Pharaoh’s corn” have stuck ever since, though scientists have long doubted that any seed survives that many centuries and still sprouts.
The food writer Jeremy Cherfas points out that this kind of wheat was brought into Italy at the start of the twentieth century, which would make the sack in the attic a family novelty rather than a relic of antiquity. We don’t know which it was. Grossi’s grandfather never said.
The branching itself is real genetics, and it’s lovely in its own right. Researchers have traced it to a single gene in tetraploid wheat that lets one spike sprout side branches, each carrying its own spikelets, so a branched ear simply holds more grain.
And honestly, the true version might be the better story. A sack waited in the dark through most of a century. A farmer threw it on a manure pile on a hunch. An old baker’s hands figured out what the machines couldn’t. Grossi still keeps the very first ears he grew from those seeds, preserved under glass in his kitchen!
Via Smithsonian Magazine, whose November feature includes Clara Vannucci’s photographs of Grossi, his fields and those first ears. Historical notes from the Emilia-Romagna heritage variety register and Eat This Newsletter. Plates from Vilmorin-Andrieux, Les meilleurs blés (1880), public domain. Additional images via Clara Vannucci.
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