Are these actually solid silver?

Mostly not. Titles saying "plated" or "plate" account for the great bulk of the 639 listings on Sellingantiques, so a solid-silver shaker is the exception. Sterling, 800-grade and Chinese silver examples do turn up, and they sit near the top of the range when they do.

What date are most of them?

The 1930s, heavily. Of 633 listings with a clean year, 484 fall in that decade, with 88 in the 1940s, 35 in the 1920s and small numbers either side. One listing cites an 1887 registration date and another is flagged simply as later than 1960. Those are the outliers.

Capacity is quoted in pints, and 37 titles state one. The range runs from a half-pint single-drink shaker up to a three-pint American sterling piece, the largest stated anywhere in the archive. One pint and one and a half pints are the sizes that recur most in the plain plated group.

Which ones are French?

"French" appears in 99 titles, with 71 of those reading "french art" and 24 mentioning Paris. That's roughly one in seven of the category. Named French models surface within it, Ondulations being the one that recurs, in 13 titles. "Large french" alone accounts for 19.

What is a recipe or menu shaker?

A shaker with drink recipes engraved or printed on the body, sometimes arranged on a rotating dial, which listings describe as dial-a-drink. Forty titles say recipe and 23 say menu. As a group they reach the top of the range, with Italian gold-plated menu types and American dial mechanisms clustering there.

Do novelty shapes turn up often?

They surface as one-offs rather than as a type. A milk churn, a penguin, a snowman, a bomb, a zeppelin airship, a champagne bottle, a skyscraper, a golf shaker and a shrapnel-shell bar set each appear only once or twice. All of them sit in the dearer half of the samples.

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Antique Silver Cocktail Shakers

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A lidded metal vessel for mixing drinks at home, usually silver-plated, usually made in the 1930s when cocktails moved out of the bar and into the sitting room.