As someone who similarly made a witch game about mixing things together, and also included a really long book to teach the player the mechanics, I can unfortunately tell you that players can't read. And that's why the onboarding process is so important for this kind of games. At this current stage, you can only try random stuff to get all the crosses in the book, and then try to decipher what each symbol mean, and then you can read the long book to make the correct potion for them. At least one tutorial guiding you to a simple spell would really be appreciated, even if it's to get the ball rolling. Otherwise, the art is really charming, and I 100% understand the effort behind designing this kind of system.