Piping Hot

[Strinka]

How did the phrase “piping hot” come about?

[Q.E.D]

Piping hot:

The question, of course, is what all this has to do with pipes, and the first thing to note is that the “pipes” in “piping hot” are not your normal plumbing “pipes.” To “pipe” in this sense is to make a sound like musical pipes (think bagpipes), i.e., to emit a whistling or hissing sound. Food served “piping hot” is, thus, hot enough to hiss, sizzle or bubble.

[Mr.Blue_Sky]

From here:

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.

A couple of other sites agree. YMMV

[GorillaMan]

I’d have guessed a connection with using clay pipes to vent gas from underneath a pastry-topped pie as it cooked. (Note that I said ‘guessed’ )

[Cunctator]

I’ve also heard a musical reference, although from a slightly different angle. It refers to the “up and down” finger movements that you make when holding something warm, like a very hot pie. It seemed that those movements resembled the ones that you make when playing a pipe/flute/recorder etc.

I don’t have any cites for this interpretation though.

[rwjefferson]

When were kettles invented? For I have heard many a kettle piping “hot!”

rwj