How did Molly Weasley make sauce out of nothing if Gamp's Law states that this is impossible?

Question

In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, when the kids and Arthur get to The Burrow from Privet Drive and Molly is cooking and raging about Fred and George's shenanigans, the following occurs:

Mrs. Weasley slammed a large copper saucepan down on the kitchen table and began to wave her wand around inside it. A creamy sauce poured from the wand tip as she stirred.

In Deathly Hallows, Hermione says that this is not possible:

“Your mother can’t produce food out of thin air,” said Hermione. “no one can. Food is the first of the five Principal Exceptions to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfigura—”

“Oh, speak English, can’t you?” Ron said, prising a fish out from between his teeth.

“It’s impossible to make good food out of nothing! You can Summon it if you know where it is, you can transform it, you can increase the quantity if you’ve already got some—”

So how was Molly causing sauce to pour from her wand, seemingly out of thin air?

Answer 1

Since we know that real food can't be created from nothingness, that leaves us with a few options:

• Molly is summoning the sauce from somewhere else, presumably elsewhere in the kitchen (decidedly possible. We see this happen repeatedly in the Hogwarts Dining Hall).

• There was already some sauce in the pan and she's using a spell to make it expand (unlikely, given how clean she likes to keep them).

• She's transforming something else in the kitchen into the sauce (like how a trek-style replicator works).

Or my personal favourite explanation;

• Like Leprechaun gold, food that is created using magic will evidently dissipate after a while. Molly is conjuring a magic sauce to bulk out the real food (perhaps a low quality meat). As long as there's some nutritious content, when the sauce goes 'poof' they won't starve. This also explains why Ron and his brothers are so skinny despite everyone in the family taking second servings.

Answer 2

Gamp's Elemental Law of Transfiguration does not allow a person to conjure food from thin air. It does not allow food to be made from that which did not exist before. However, J.K. Rowling has made it very clear that food that already exists can be summoned from one place to another. Molly likely summoned the sauce from another area, and channeled it so it poured from the end of her wand into the pot.

Answer 3

We see characters absorb things into their wands, for example when Hermione cleans spilled ink off of someone's homework. It is sort of sucked into the wand tip. I always suspected that Molly made a sauce earlier and, as many mothers might freeze food for later, absorbed it into her wand for use when she was cooking.

I don't recall much being expelled from a wand in this style, though warm air is used from the wand to dry clothes etc. Though I'm not saying they sat by a fire once absorbing warm air for use later.

Answer 4

Food is a rather imprecise term.

Magic can conjure things a person can swallow, and can surely alter the taste of something. We even know that magic can even conjure things that are healthy to consume, such as water.

It is not a stretch to imagine that the sauce, while delicious, does not count as food in the relevant technical sense.