About 6-7 years ago at a Pakistani or Indian grocery store in the suburbs of Washington, DC, I purchased a glass jar of some kind of preserved nut. It was in thick sugar syrup. When I finally worked up the nerve to try them, the taste wasn't that strong...they mostly tasted sweet of course...but they definitely had an exotic earthy taste like nothing I'd tasted before. I found it unappealing and after eating a couple, tossed the rest out. I don't think there were as many wikipedia articles back then but when I looked it up on the internet there was scant information about it, other than a few mentions of the species of tree they came from and that it was sometimes used for food and/or medicine. They were oval but more pointed at one end, about little over an inch long. They had expressed something during the preservation/cooking that made the sugar solution seem blackish. Not very appetizing! It was sold alongside things like tamarind preserves but was definitely not a name I'd seen before, that's why I bought them. I'm pretty sure "nut" was in the name on the label though...something exotic sounding like "Gourza nut" but multiple attempts to google such names have failed! They weren't betel nuts. They definitely came from a flowering dicot.

Thing is, in looking around on the internet, I can't find out what it was. The Wikipedia list of all the world's nuts doesn't list it.

Any ideas?