»In which we 'love toping'

Even as a Danish study claims that men should drink a cocktail a day (!!), I fondly recall the days when we enjoyed a tipple while on the clock.
Michael Pollan, in his recent book "The Omnivore's Dilemma", also remarks on this practice:

As the historian W.J. Rorabaugh tells the story in The Alcoholic Republic, we drank the hard stuff at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, before work and after and very often during. Employers were expected to supply spirits over the course of the workday; in fact, the modern coffee break began as a late-morning whiskey break called "the elevenses." (Just to pronounce it makes you sound tipsy.) Except for a brief respite Sunday morning in church, Americans simply did not gather -- whether for a barn raising or a quilting bee, corn husking or political rally -- without passing the whiskey jug. Visitors from Europe -- hardly models of sobriety themselves -- marveled at the free flow of American spirits. "Come on then, if you love toping," the journalist William Cobbett wrote his fellow Englishmen in a dispatch from America. "For here you may drink yourself blind at the price of sixpence."

Although Pollan is using this quotation and the surround paragraph to illustrate other uses for a corn surplus, I find the historical note of whiskey consumption quite amusing. toping refers to the love of liquor, and the habitual drinking of ditto.