Jesse put six oysters in front of me, just the way I like them: drowning in lemon juice.

“It wakes up your mouth!” I told Angus. But I knew Angus would never eat an oyster. “Oyster” was right after “scallop” on his nightmare list.

He held up his hand like a stop sign and said, “Too rich for my blood.”

That’s what Angus always says when he doesn’t want to try something. I think he got that saying from his mom but doesn’t realize it.

Jesse was lining up clean glasses on the shelf under the bar, and we could only see the top of his head. “Actually,” he said, “oysters used to be considered low-class.”

Angus reached for an olive. “How come?”

“Because oysters were everywhere, and they were cheap. But then New York City started running out of oysters. And when there weren’t enough to go around anymore, rich folks got interested.” Jesse stood up and stretched, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Now they’re downright fancy!”

Sometimes I forget how tall Jesse is. I held up one hand, and he slapped me five, which made me feel tall, too.

Angus shook his head. “Rich people.”

“This used to be the oyster capital of the world,” Jesse said. “Did you know that some of the old streets and buildings downtown were partly built with crushed oyster shells? True story. But people polluted the water and diseases got into the oyster beds, so now even if you could find one around here, it wouldn’t be safe to eat it. But someday, maybe.”

That’s why Jesse drags all the restaurant’s empty oyster shells to Brooklyn twice a week—people are trying to rebuild the New York oyster beds. He says putting a lot of old oyster shells in the water is a good way to make new oysters want to move in.

“Oysters actually make the water cleaner just by living there,” Jesse told Angus. “They’re like little vacuum cleaners.”

Angus made a face. “Now I’m never eating one.”

“Did the colonists eat oysters?” I asked Jesse.

“I’m guessing yes. Native people had been eating oysters for thousands of years before the colonists showed up. The colonists probably learned from them. It’s not as if there were a bunch of supermarkets around.”

Angus looked at my oysters and said, “I would have waited for a supermarket.”

Jesse looked at my oysters, too. He said, “Waiting makes me hungry.”

—

Mr. Home got super excited when I asked him whether the colonists ate oysters. It turns out Jesse was right about them learning from Native people, and that if it weren’t for oysters, a lot of colonists might have starved during the winter of 1609. He said that oysters at the colonial breakfast would be “really terrific,” especially if we could bring them in for free.

The final class 5-334 colonial-breakfast menu:

Bread (from the store)