In the summer of 1662, Samuel Pepys, then a rising young figure in the British Navy Office, invited his boss, Naval Commissioner Peter Pett, to dinner at his home on Seething Lane, near the Tower of London. Pepys was twenty-nine years old and presumably hoped to impress his superior. Instead, to his horror and dismay, he discovered that when his plate of sturgeon was set before him it had within it “many little worms creeping.”