After our weekly Saturday morning trip to the farmer’s market, we returned home to put the perishables away, then headed back out up Monona Drive and turned down Cottage Grove road to visit the antiques mall just past the highway overpass. We were in search of a cocktail shaker. There’s a good reason to explain why we’re looking for one in an antiques mall.

My Darling B had a particular cocktail shaker in mind, a three-piece job with a cap, a top with a strainer, and a cup. She wanted the whole shebang to be made of stainless steel or, if that wasn’t possible, made of glass with a stainless steel top. And, as usual, she wouldn’t have one that was made in China. Nothing personal against the Chinese, she just didn’t want one made of radium or anthrax or whatever cheap, toxic substance the Chinese make cocktail shakers and other kitchen gadgets out of.

We already have a pair of cocktail shakers that we bought mostly for decorative purposes. They’re both made of glass and printed with recipes of the most popular mixed drinks. We didn’t indulge in mixed drinks at the time we bought them, but we snatched them up anyway because they reminded us of the kitchy stuff our parents had in their liquor cabinets. Many moons later, when we were trying to mix mojitos or something that had to be mixed up in a cocktail shaker, we discovered that the ones we had were good enough for decoration but actually pretty lousy when it came to mixing cocktails, because both of them leaked like sieves if we tried to shake them even a little bit.

So B went in search of a three-piece cocktail shaker and was quickly frustrated by what was on offer these days. The made-in-anywhere-but-China requirement turned out to be a serious impediment. Every single freaking stainless steel cocktail shaker she could find was made in China. No big surprise there, but she figured, no problem, Americans used to be big drinkers. Surely there would be a good “retro” cocktail shaker on e-bay.

She went looking for almost two weeks. No joy.

That’s why I suggested we swing by the antiques mall this morning after our trip to the farmer’s market. It’s not really what you picture when you think of a mall. It’s more like a huge pole barn sectioned off into eight-by-eight stalls along a dozen aisles, give or take, that seem to go on forever. The vendors in each stall appeared to be allowed to get as creative with their assigned space as they liked. Some of them showed little to no creative spark at all, their stalls being the almost-empty boxes with a few things hanging from pegboard walls. Others have gone to superhuman effort to build up hugely imaginative displays that pack as much bricabrac into each tiny domain as possible.

Most of the stuff was reasonably priced, even for antiques, and a lot of the stalls were jammed full of drinking glasses, pitchers, beer glasses, and other booze-related stuff like bottles and neon signs. I thought it would be a cinch to find an old three-piece cocktail shaker there. As it turned out we did find one, but only one, and only after our search dragged out until the second to the last aisle where I spotted almost exactly what B was looking for, a three-piece all-metal cocktail shaker, except that it was made of spun aluminum. She hung on to it as we finished our search of the last aisle and came up empty, so we took it home.