I love this use of the Carta system! I feel like it underscores the complicated and mysterious nature of the recipe book that the player has to venture through it, decoding one ingredient at a time.
The ingredient descriptions are also great, and help so much to set a tone. Reading through them, I could already imagine what some of my journal entries could be like, and how those little bits of extra flavor text would help me both in theorizing about the ingredient's purpose, and in reminiscing about times past.