rather warm

[spunkypumpkn]

where did the phrase 'piping hot' come from?

It made me wonder as I was reading the packaging on the back of some fish fingers, and it stated to only serve when 'piping hot'.......  got me to thinking.

 

[Quizmonster]

Click http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-pip1.htm for an answer.

[spunkypumpkn]

Many thanks. The website says..

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.