piping hot

[Flip]

Does anyone have any idea where the term "Piping Hot" originates from? I've done some searching and can't seem to find it! Reps to the first person who can find it.

[mike's02ls1]

My guess would be it came from Australia...

[Flip]

sounds like that could be promising... (i'll rep everyone that trys... when i can again... too much rep given...)

[Flip]

Looks like i win this one...:

The sense of piping that’s relevant here is the one for making a musical sound, as by playing the pipes. The idea is that a dish that’s piping hot is one so hot it makes a sizzling or hissing noise, perhaps not closely similar to the sound of the pipes, but at least audible. It’s first recorded near the end of the fourteenth century, in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In the Miller’s Tale it says (in modernised spelling): “Wafers piping hot out of the gleed”, where a wafer is a kind of thin cake, baked between wafer-irons, and gleed is the hot coals of a fire.

[Rican219]