Know Your Millets

All grains except the big shots, such as wheat and rice, are called millets. They tend to be bitter and strong-tasting, but they grow successfully where wheat and rice won’t.

Although we never make 100% millet bread today, the Romans did. Their favorite millet was panicum, which simply meant “the grain for bread.” It’s our usual health store millet, P. miliaceum. The small round seeds used to be a common pet store birdseed too, but today, birds mostly get fed canary grass (Phalaris canariensis).

The Romans also used a millet they called milium, which meant roughly “that which you grind,” so it was probably used for mush. This was foxtail millet (Setaria italica), whose ears look a little like ears of wheat. In fact, the Slavic word for wheat, pshenitsa, comes from psheno, the Slavic name of this millet (which happens to mean “that which you pound”), so the Slavs must have been growing it before they learned of wheat.

A common millet in Africa and India is Pennisetum typhoides, known as cattail millet. It bears its seeds in cylinders a little like corn cobs, which may be what’s behind the reports of “corn” being grown in Africa before Columbus.

The Bigfoot of the millet world, Sorghum bicolor, is a major grain all the way from Africa to China. In fact, sorghum (kaoliang), rather than rice, was the staff of life in China at the time of Confucius. There are eight main varieties of it, most (such as the Middle Eastern dhura and the Indian jowar) grown for the starchy grains, but one variety has a sweet sap that’s boiled down into sorghum syrup, and one is raised just for its rigid stalks, which are made into brooms.